A Dog's Life
WOLL, JOSEPHINE
A Dog's Life Faithful Ruslan By Georgi Vladimov Simon & Schuster. 220pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Josephine Woll Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, Howard University The climax of Georgi...
...Some 20 people are wounded, a few savagely, before the dogs are finally beaten off...
...As they stroll together through the town, singing and smiling, one of the workers breaks off from the group, perhaps to look in a shop window...
...Eat it, and you find that it's mustard that sears your tongue and rips your belly...
...Although the young workers do not know the answer, to Valdimov—and to his readers—it couldn't be clearer...
...The man tries to shoo it away...
...He accepts with incomplete comprehension, for instance, an incident where the camp commander turns hoses on restrive, rebellious prisoners—in minus 40 degree weather...
...Ruslan knows full well what will happen should he eat it...
...And even now, as dark thoughts cloud his mind, he is unable to betray his idealism...
...Not Ruslan...
...Immediately, a dog lunges after him...
...A friendly hand offers you food that smells good...
...Vladimov's theme is not a new one...
...An assortment of large, fierce-looking dogs escort them as they leave the platform...
...While he too goes to town, it is merely to wait for the new train-loads of prisoners that are bound to come, and he has nothing save contempt for his accomodating brothers...
...He did it for love, and thought his Master slightly deficient in intelligence for not realizing that...
...Suspicion has been bred into them as deeply as their tracking skills, their tough, black-ribbed palates, their long, cold-resistant hair...
...and D-503 in Zamyatin's We, a model citizen of his brave new world, who considers his developing soul a malignant illness...
...he is, sad to say, an idealist...
...the dog sinks its teeth into his arm...
...He is not an opportunist, or a pragmatist...
...Most of the other dogs, hungry and cold, make their way to town and adapt to their new life, cuddling up to strangers, kowtowing for food...
...For without that love, that faith, his life would become entirely meaningless, and how could he then go on living...
...A group of workers, young men and women, get off the train at the station and begin to walk toward their destination, an ex-labor camp now being rebuilt as a cellulose fiber factory...
...The lesson is easy for the stupidest dog, and the one who is the title character of this book is far from stupid: "Absolutely anything which did not come from Master's hand was filthy, poisoned, tainted, and sinful...
...Intent on proving his superiority to ordinary people, and especially to his ex-charge, the Master offers the dog a bread-and-mustard sandwich...
...The question hangs pall-like in the air: Why...
...Are they better...
...Even during his camp days, Ruslan recalls, he never caught an escaping prisoner for the food he would receive as a reward...
...Sleeping in town, under trucks and in corners, trotting out toward the camp each day weak with hunger, Ruslan finally picks up the scent he has been waiting for?that of his Master, whom he tracks to the railway buffet...
...By then the men who had fallen out of the window no longer attempted to get up but simply twitched feebly as they lay on the snow—and turned white in front of the watching eyes...
...Running out into the snow, retching and howling with pain, all he understands is that his Master has stopped loving him, and his own love for the Service is threatened...
...Another friendly hand reaches out to ruffle your fur...
...These are almost the only human characters in the novel...
...Or just weaker...
...He is as unable to betray his Master as he is to take food from strangers...
...In one of the most powerful scenes of the novel, though, Ruslan does achieve a measure of awareness...
...Reviewed by Josephine Woll Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, Howard University The climax of Georgi Vladimov's gripping novel occurs in the springtime of 1957...
...Meet it, and a barb lacerates your ear, blinding you with pain...
...The dogs attacked because they are supposed to attack, because that is what they have been trained to do all their lives to prisoners who leave the line...
...Can individuals weaned away from freedom cope with it...
...The perspective does restrict the scope of the novel, however...
...The place is a shabby, rundown village in Siberia...
...For he has selflessly dedicated his life to the Service, giving his love completely to his Master...
...True, these are not prisoners?these are harmless factory workers?but how are the dogs to know free men from prisoners, friends from enemies...
...Our reaction to the horrors of camp life is intensified by Ruslan's limited understanding...
...His Master is drinking with a former prisoner, called by Ruslan the Shabby Man...
...the workers find this odd, but rather amusing, and reach out to stroke the dogs...
...To Ruslan the corpses are like "large, white, freshly sawed logs...
...A full measure of tragedy can only be accorded to a fully conscious, and self-conscious, hero: an Oedipus blinded by his own guilt, an Othello aware of Desdemona's innocence...
...Ruslan is the best example the worst victim of this perversion of the moral instinct...
...Threatened, but not destoryed...
...The corruption of natural gifts, the prostitution of idealism that is both the explanation for and product of Stalinism, preoccupies many Soviet samiz-dat writers...
...The dogs that are too old or set in their ways to be retrained have been set free...
...The action takes place just after the camps have been closed, thanks to Ni-kita Khrushchev's revelatory speech at the 20th Party Congress...
...Ultimately, Ruslan dies for the cause he believes in...
...He interprets the changing circumstances in the only way he can: not as the end of his Service, but as an interregnum...
...But he cannot refuse...
...others are responsible...
...The other dogs don't take things quite so far...
...What makes Faithful Ruslan fresh and effective is the fact that it is narrated from the dogs' point of view...
...Indeed, Ruslan resembles some two-legged heroes: Rubin in Sol-zhenitsyn's First Circle, whose humanistic private morality loses the battle with his Marxist ethic of historical determinism...
...Such servility is to him unthinkable...
...Suddenly the others, moving to help their colleague, find themselves under attack: The dogs, no longer amusing, surge after the workers, biting, gripping limbs, tearing through cloth to reach muscle and sinew...
...It is, however, a paltry freedom, and one Ruslan doesn't want...
...Ruslan cannot attain this level: He has not destroyed his innate judgment, his natural talents...
...Taken as pups from their well-trained mothers, who willingly surrender them, they are taught to trust their masters alone...
...These hard questions posed by Vladimov add up to a disturbing, provocative work...
Vol. 62 • June 1979 • No. 13
